Archive for Gays

“We news this all along,” Savage, a well-known columnist on gay issues, said. “We joked — I wrote at the time when the president was opposed to marriage equality during the campaign, and in his first term, that he was going to pretend to oppose marriage equality and we would pretend to believe him, those of us who are activists, and we would hold his feet to the fire.”

Savage said “nobody” in the gay community believed Obama when he went from being in favor of gay marriage early in his political career to opposing it during the 2008 election and then being pro gay marriage again prior to the 2012 election.

“Nobody I think in the LGBT civil rights movement believed him when he went from being pro marriage equality in 1996 to oppose to for it again,” Savage said.

John Kerry, yes; Barack Obama, no.

But you know what else? They’re cool with being lied to:

“It was useful political theater,” Savage said. “I agree with David Axelrod and the president that the country wasn’t ready in 2008 for a ticket of a national candidate who supported marriage equality. And by pragmatically making this choice to jettison his support for marriage equality the president managed to bring the country along by making his discomfort with the political calculation he clearly made part of the drama and part of the performance of his office and it benefited LGBT people in this country tremendously.”

Who hasn’t lied for sex? And by extension, who hasn’t lied about sex for votes?

I just didn’t realize gays were so easy. If I had known in college…well, never mind. Too late now.

“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that’s not what America’s about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don’t contract them.”

Was he referring to the Second Amendment? I’ve heard of gay-dar, but do they also hear frequencies we breeders don’t hear? And why were you so cool with him lying to you year after year?

Obama, a consistent supporter of civil rights for gay couples, nevertheless said as early as 2004 and through 2008 that he didn’t support same-sex marriage. He had written that he believed “that American society can choose to carve out a special place for the union of a man and a woman.” In 2010, he said he wasn’t prepared to reverse himself. This week, the president said he thinks same-sex couples should be able to get married. On the Flip-O-Meter, he earns a Full Flop.

I support gay marriage, and have as long as I knew gay people wanted to marry. But no one’s going to marry someone who gives it away for free. Why buy the cow when you get the milk for nothing? Think, sluts!

If a baker can be forced to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding that might offend his religious beliefs—and he can be—then what’s the problem here?

A bakery is fighting a legal claim after it refused to inscribe a gay slur on a cake.

Thousands of customers are coming to the defense of the Azucar Bakery in Denver.

The owner says a customer came into her shop about a year ago asking to have the slur written on a bible-shaped cake, but she says she had to draw the line.

Marjorie Silva said she’d make the cake, but not write the message.

The customer cancelled the order then filed a religious discrimination complaint.

“We did feel it was not right for us to write hateful words or pictures about human beings,” Silva said.

People from across the world have sent messages in support of the owner’s decision.

A state agency will hear the case in March.

Boilerplate disclaimer: I support gay marriage, and oppose gay slurs.

But I also support religious freedom (as areligious as I am), and can’t get my head around a baker who does not discriminate against gay customers being compelled by the state to participate in a celebration he finds privately offensive.

That being the case, however, if the customer wants “fa**ot” written on a cake, start writing or we start seizing assets.

Users of Grindr, the leading gay hookup app, have voted Hillary Clinton their “Straight Ally of the Year.”

The former secretary of state joins a slate of other noteworthy figures highlighted in Grindr’s ‘Best of Awards’ for 2014, including Neil Patrick Harris (voted “Gay Icon of the Year” for the second year in a row) and Vladimir Putin (voted “Enemy of the LGBT Community”).

While Clinton’s team has not responded to request for comment, it seems likely she would welcome the positive reaction from Grindr’s gay users.

Clinton did not publicly support same-sex marriage until last year, after she stepped down as secretary of state.

What is it with these supposed liberals—Obama, Hillary—denying people the right to love whom they will? She was senator from New York for eight years, for pete’s sake! No gay constituent ever asked her about their right to marry? How come I’ve supported gay marriage for a long as I’ve known they wanted to marry, while these guys were hung up on their prejudices for years? Where’s my award?

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a ribeye, extra rare, and the chef or the waiter or somebody messed it up. I sent it back to the kitchen. A lesbian couple near Uniontown, Ohio, ordered a baby, extra white, and their order got messed up — the sperm bank mistakenly gave them the product of a black man, with the result that their daughter, Payton, is half black. And that’s the problem with treating children as consumer products: You cannot send them back to the kitchen.

Good thing fertility doctors don’t work for tips.

Naturally, there is a lawsuit — for breach of warranty, among other things. The couple say that they are suffering stress from raising their mixed-race daughter in an overwhelmingly white community. I can picture the scene: A mob of angry Ohioans, torches and pitchforks at the ready, menacingly reads a declaration: “We, the town fathers of Obscurity, Ohio, were perfectly ready to be accepting, supportive, and welcoming of this lesbian couple’s test-tube baby. But when that lesbian couple’s test-tube baby turns out to be half black — well, that’s a bridge too far for the decent people of Ohio.” I suppose they might then burn half a cross — Ohio’s pretty weird.

While one must pity the poor little girl who is being treated like a defective Honda Civic, it’s a delicious clash of progressive pieties. The mother — and somehow I suspect that I’ll be informed five minutes from now that it is wicked to call the half of the couple who carried the child and gave birth the “mother” — Jennifer Cramblett, among other things complains that it is difficult to find a place to get her daughter a decent haircut. It should be a hoot watching her make that case in court. I’m a white, conservative guy from Texas, and even I know better than to go skipping merrily into the cultural minefield that is black women’s hair, a subject that calls to mind my favorite cowboy proverb: “Never miss a good chance to shut up.”

Cowboy or blogger, them’s words to live by.

Of course the couple have a legal case: the product they were delivered was not what they ordered. And indeed they can’t send it back. Everything after that is abhorrent.

Contrast these women with the lummoxes who host the sports talk show I listen to every morning. Imagine being in the delivery room with your wife, they proposed, maybe hoping for a son, and a girl is born. There is not one second—not one instant—of disappointment. That’s your daughter! She’s your baby girl. Maybe you return the catcher’s glove, maybe you keep it, but the last thing you concern yourself with is who will be her barber.

I know several gay couples with children. If anything, they are better parents than many straight couples I know, though the sample size is small. I put that down to self-selection: it takes a little more thought and effort to have a baby if you’re gay. If you’re straight, it may take little more than a bottle of zinfandel.

But narcissism cares not about race, gender, or sexual preference. Regardless of where it came from, these women have another life in their hands. The “mother” carried it to term in her womb. Give them their money back, absolutely; come to a settlement over the “mistake”. But I hold these women to a higher standard. They are accepted in their community, even if they are different in at least one respect. And they can’t reciprocate? To an innocent baby?

Last word to Williamson:

A strange thing: Nothing in the modern world has contributed to the devaluation of women as pitilessly as has the reduction of motherhood to the status of a take-out order of ovum foo young, and yet nothing is held so sacred by feminists. I cannot imagine that when the early feminists wrote about the “commodification of women” that they ever imagined it would get so literal, with product warranties and all.

The National Health Interview Survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is the federal government’s most relied upon estimate of the nation’s health and behaviors, found that fewer than 3% of respondents self-identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Only 1.6% of respondents self-identified as gay or lesbian, and even less, 0.7%, self-identified as bisexual.

The estimate of the percentage of bisexuals was lower than the 2008 General Social Survey, which estimated that number at 1.1 percent, while other surveys have intimated that the percentage of bisexuals is the same as gays.

Conversely, 96.6% self-identified as straight, while 1.1% answered, “I don’t know the answer” or stated they were “something else.”

Gay leaders are expressing alarm at the just-released numbers from the Center for Disease Control that place the percentage of Americans identifying as homosexual at only 1.6% of the adult population.

Anyhow, I would have thought the number was larger, but I didn’t ask 35,000 people.

The CDC defends its survey, explaining the current survey polled 35,000 adults. The CDC’s National Center on Health Statistics told the Washington Post they “conducted rigorous tests to come up with the questions and interview method. They conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews—far more than is typical—and did three field tests, including one in which they experimented with a more private interview method that allowed respondents to listen to questions using headphones and type their answers into a computer.” James Dahlhamer, a health statistician with the CDC, told the Post there was no difference in the results using the two methods.

Like I said, I might have supposed the percentage was larger, but what do I know?

But get a load of what really makes the gay lobby angry:

Scout, who goes by one name, a spokesman for CenterLink’s Network of LGBT Health Equity, told the Washington Post, “The truth is, numbers matter, and political influence matters.”

…

Ellyn Ruthstrom, president of the Bi-Sexual Resource Center in Boston, said, “It’s just going to make it harder for us when we’re going out and talking to people about the bisexual population. We have a real hard time already with people not taking the bisexual identity seriously.”

“Political influence”? “Taking the bisexual identity seriously”? I don’t care what the number is, but I believe there is a number. And I believe it is derived by methods a lot closer to the CDC’s than to “Scout”‘s or the Bi-SexResoC’s. May I suggest that if you wish to be taken seriously, you act seriously.

I support gay marriage, but with one nagging doubt. Once we decide we have the right to change the definition of marriage, do we have the right to stop? What are our criteria for defining what is not marriage? Wherever we draw the line, aren’t we just giving in to another set of prejudices and biases?

That’s not enough to change my mind about two men or two women marrying with full legal rights, but my prejudices and biases are piqued. Indeed, we have heard of challenges to marriages from polygamists, incest advocates, and others who want to speed the “evolving paradigm” of marriage. Who are we to bar the courthouse door?

Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission on Friday ordered a baker to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples, finding his religious objections to the practice did not trump the state’s anti-discrimination statutes.

The unanimous ruling from the seven-member commission upheld an administrative law judge’s finding in December that Jack Phillips violated civil rights law when he refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple in 2012. The couple sued.

“I can believe anything I want, but if I’m going to do business here, I’d ought to not discriminate against people,” Commissioner Raju Jaram said.

Phillips, a devout Christian who owns the Masterpiece Cakeshop in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, said the decision violates his First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise of his religion. “I will stand by my convictions until somebody shuts me down,” he told reporters after the ruling.

He added his bakery has been so overwhelmed by supporters eager to buy cookies and brownies that he does not currently make wedding cakes.

Perhaps that’s the best solution. Rather than allow a business owner to refuse service to someone (a practice with a very bad history), the business just changes its practices. Phillips never discriminated against customers for being gay—even baking cakes for them—he just refused the business of baking their wedding cakes. As with a lot of thorny social problems, I see both sides. His solution to stop baking wedding cakes altogether seems the best solution. His business is booming, and the gay couple who felt discriminated against feel vindicated. Both claim victory.

Or perhaps not. What was the exact damage down to the gay couple looking to purchase a wedding cake? How many other bakers do you suppose would have refused? I’d say none. In fact, I find it almost astonishing that they had the bad luck to choose the one devout Christian baker who would decline to accept their business. No, that’s not right. He would happily accept their business—for muffins, rolls, scones, even cakes—just not a wedding cake. To do so would violate his religious belief that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. How did these three find each other?

I am certain that Adam and Steve (I can’t be bothered to check their real names) would have found joy at just about every other bakery they went to. There was no systemic discrimination against them (as there was with black people at lunch counters and water fountains in the 50s), just one man with a religious conscience. But that could not be tolerated. Tolerance is a one-way street, and that street leads inevitably to acceptance, and thence to celebration. Woe betide you if you try to go against the prevailing direction.

Medicare will now be covering sex change surgeries–meaning it won’t be long before private insurance is required to do likewise.

But that won’t be the end of it. Over at Human Exceptionalism I nominate Body Integrity Identity Disorder–sometimes called “amputee wannabe”–as the next affliction for which surgery will one day be required to be a covered service. In this time of identity-is-all politics, what principled reason can there be to say no?

I have no good answer. Do you?

PS: The title of the post is misleading. It’s not the legislative branch (or not just) that’s leading the charge against the traditional definition of marriage, but the judicial branch. Marriage is defined in state laws across the country, but court after court now insists those laws are discriminatory. Again, I agree. But now what?

Mark Steyn got into trouble (as if—the kind of trouble David Ortiz feels when he sees a hanging curveball) for citing this old Bob Hope chestnut:

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”

As he learned—as so many have learned—gay does not mean what it used to mean (cheerful: happy, jolly, merry, bright, glad, sunny, joyful, joyous, lighthearted, in good spirits, in high spirits, sparkling, bubbly, exuberant, buoyant, ebullient, elated, gleeful; breezy, cheery, jaunty, animated, radiant, smiling; jovial, genial, good-humored; carefree, unworried, untroubled, without a care in the world; informal upbeat, chipper, chirpy, peppy, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of beans; dated gay; formal jocund, blithe):

Mozilla Chief Executive Brendan Eich has stepped down, the company said on Thursday, after an online dating service urged a boycott of the company’s web browser because of a donation Eich made to opponents of gay marriage.

The software company came under fire for appointing Eich as CEO last month. In 2008, he gave money to oppose the legalization of gay marriage in California, a hot-button issue especially at a company that boasts about its policy of inclusiveness and diversity.

…

While gay activists applauded the move, many in the technology community lamented the departure of Eich, who invented the programming language Javascript and co-founded Mozilla.

“Brendan Eich is a good friend of 20 years, and has made a profound contribution to the Web and to the entire world,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted.

Eich donated $1,000 in 2008 in support of California’s Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in the state until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in June.

His resignation came days after OkCupid.com, the popular online dating site, called for a boycott of Mozilla Firefox to protest the world’s No. 2 Web browser naming a gay marriage opponent as chief executive.

The White House executive pastry chef, Bill Yosses, is calling it quits, in part because first lady Michelle Obama has discouraged his creativity in working with full fat, sugar, and eggs, The New York Times reported.

Old-fashioned “20 percent traditional desserts” make White House appearances only on special occasions. On Thanksgiving, “the Crustmaster,” as President Barack Obama calls him, was authorized to make different kinds of pies, and on Christmas he has created a detailed gingerbread version of the White House.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel came in 2011 for a state dinner, Yosses created his own version of phyllo strudel with a plethora of farmer’s cheese, raisins, and apple. When French President Francois Hollande came in February, Yosses was permitted to prepare chocolate pastries without fretting about fat and sugar.

Here was that glorious moment:

We’re using a paint sprayer (previously unused of course) to give a micro-thin layer of chocolate over soft and creamy ganache cake. The bittersweet chocolate comes from Hawaii, and it will be served à la mode with vanilla ice-cream from Pennsylvania.

Bet that peeved Michelle no end. No wonder he was out a month later.

Yosses, now 60, was brought on board by Laura Bush in 2007 when decadent desserts were more welcome. With the arrival of the Obamas, Yosses found himself picking more ingredients from the White House garden, including strawberries, blueberries, and pineapple sage.

Á chacun a son goût, as they say. If the Obama’s like pineapple sage better than crème brulée, why shouldn’t they have it? But you’ve seen the president when he’s allowed to go out without the little ball and chain. It’s all butter, cream, chocolate, and eggs. And you can’t keep an ice cream cone out of his hands when he’s on vacation. Any nutritionist will tell you to include a little fat in your diet. You crave it and you need it. But let Michelle terrorize the kitchen staff if it keeps her happy.

But I want to consider a different angle (Rush and I came to these thoughts independently). Yosses is gay, and is moving to New York City with his husband. You all know that’s a-ok with me.

But if a gay couple can insist that a baker may not refuse on religious grounds to make their wedding cake (offering muffins and cookies—even non-wedding cakes—in their place), why does Michelle get to hound a gay baker out of his job without being criticized?

A new review of published evidence challenges current guidelines that suggest in order to reduce heart disease risk, people should generally restrict intake of saturated fats – like those found in butter and dairy foods – in favor of unsaturated fats – such as in margarine and sunflower oil.

The analysis, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine by an international group led by a team at the UK’s University of Cambridge, included 72 separate studies on heart risk and intake of fatty acids.

They found no evidence to support guidelines that say people should restrict saturated fat consumption to lower their risk of developing heart disease.

God spare us from these liberal do-gooders. They’ll be the death of us. Certainly the death of our jobs.

A coalition of black pastors announced on Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that they are launching a campaign to gather one million signatures on a petition calling for the impeachment of Attorney General Eric Holder for violating his oath of office by trying “to coerce states to fall in line with the same-sex ‘marriage’ agenda.”

“President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have turned their backs on the values the American people hold dear, values particularly cherished in the black community: values like marriage, which should be strengthened and promoted, rather than weakened and undermined,” says a statement by the Coalition of African American Pastors that has been posted online with their impeachment petition.

“Our nation calls for the building up of a healthier marriage culture; instead, our elected leaders are bent on destroying marriage, remaking it as a genderless institution and reorienting it to be all about the desires of adults rather than the needs of children,” says the coalition.

…

“For abandoning the oath he swore in taking office and his duty to defend the common good, Attorney General Holder should be impeached by Congress,” says the coalition. “CAAP is calling on all men and women of good will to sign the following petition urging Congress to take action against the Attorney General’s lawlessness today!”

Again, I don’t agree with them on gay marriage, but there are plenty of reasons Holder should go (urging state AGs to ignore the law being the most recent one). I will also defend their right to their position, even if don’t agree with it. They are not haters; they are pastors taking a position on principle. But if they are to be true to their principles, they should call for Obama to go too.

A closeted gay student living in West Monroe, Louisiana has written a powerful essay, criticizing the town’s most famous residents – Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson.

Robertson made headlines after issuing homophobic comments in a GQ article, at one point comparing gay sex to bestiality, which got him put on suspension by the A&E network. But the network announced yesterday that they would be reinstating Robertson to the show, who so far has remained unapologetic about the comments.

In an essay posted on Times-Picuyne columnist Robert Mann’s blog, the communications student writes that Robertson probably didn’t mean to hurt anyone with his statements, he nonetheless created a hostile environment.

‘He encouraged – hopefully unintentionally – a two-week-long “fag bashing” in Monroe and around the world. He made me feel unsafe in my own home. I can’t count how many times I heard “faggot” over the Christmas visit home.’

The author says he’s never met Robertson but was raised by a man just like him, revealing that his father called him an asshole for coming out to his mother and told him that his boyfriend would never be welcomed at his house.

‘My Phil Robertson threatened my life because I had the audacity to be who I am,’ he wrote.

You’ve never met him, but you know all about him? Who’s prejudiced now?

“We’re Bible-thumpers who just happened to end up on television,” he tells me. “You put in your article that the Robertson family really believes strongly that if the human race loved each other and they loved God, we would just be better off. We ought to just be repentant, turn to God, and let’s get on with it, and everything will turn around.”

…

As far as Phil is concerned, he was literally born again. Old Phil—the guy with the booze and the pills—died a long time ago, and New Phil sees no need to apologize for him: “We never, ever judge someone on who’s going to heaven, hell. That’s the Almighty’s job. We just love ’em, give ’em the good news about Jesus—whether they’re homosexuals, drunks, terrorists. We let God sort ’em out later, you see what I’m saying?”

The next time I watch Duck Dynasty will be the first time. I do not share much theologically with Phil Robertson (and not much more politically).

But I cannot stand people who play the victim. You kept your reputation to yourself, but had no problem smearing Robertson’s, ascribing beliefs, words, behaviors to him opposite to those he seems to hold. Weak. Very weak.

Did Robertson put the F-word in your family’s mouth? No, they did that. Sorry, sucks to be you, I guess, but it’s nothing to do with Robertson. You’ve got family problems, we get it, but you don’t know Robertson and he doesn’t know you.

Any sympathy I might have felt is reversed into contempt for the way you went about this.

Ethan Krupp, the little man who played “Pajama Boy” in a widely mocked Obamacare ad, once characterized himself as a “liberal f*ck.”

Krupp, an Organizing for Action (OFA) content writer who became the face of progressive America while wearing a onesie pajama suit, also remarked that gays “are all liberal f*cks” and criticized a “conservative gay prick” on his now-deleted WordPress blog, entitled “Not Being Creative.”

“I am a Liberal F*ck,” Krupp wrote in one post. “A Liberal F*ck is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views and sarcasm to win any argument while make the opponents feel terrible about themselves. I won every argument but one.”

Funny. I’ve known many, many liberal f*cks, and all they are is liberal f*cks. But E was just getting started:

Krupp then detailed the only political argument he claimed her ever lost, a drunken encounter he had with a “conservative gay prick.”

“I sat in a pizza joint, chomping on meat-heavy pizza and slamming whisky sours with gay guys on Pride Parade day in Columbus, Ohio; My gay roommate and friends loved to ironically ‘bro-out.’ I love gays because they are all liberal f*cks too,” Krupp wrote.

That last paragraph must be the most smug example of self-regard since Henry VIII’s last diary entry. I had a gay roommate in college (albeit many years ago); I can’t recall that he and his gay friends ever “bro’d-out” “chomping meat-heavy pizza” while “slamming whiskey sours”. At a pizza “joint”, no less. Is that our Pajama Boy play-acting Chuck Norris or something? It’s certainly putrid writing.

And it explains the conceited expression on his face, which seemed to settle on his face long ago:

As The Daily Caller reported, Krupp was accused of racism and anti-Semitism during his college-aged stint as the editor of the Madison, Wisconsin comedy newspaper the “Madison Misnomer.”

…

“We have no morals, and we will attack you. But you really don’t have to worry because no one reads the paper anyway,” Krupp added.

Madison is where Krupp cut his fangs:

“I have had the privilege of knowing Ethan Krupp for five years,” wrote a blogger on the website Ryanwolf.so.

…

“The past couple days have shown what the other side consists of. In short: homophobics, bigots, and prejudice emasculators. Even more concisely: assholes. Mustering up mud to sling at a photo of someone they don’t even know. Basing opinions on appearances. Their opining proving their foolishness, ignorance, and rottenness,” wrote the friend.

“For one, you would have been hard-pressed to see Ethan on the UW campus without a beautiful, I mean beautiful girl on his arm.

Yes, we all know girls like that. But what is a “prejudice emasculator”?

I don’t care if Ethan Krupp is gay, straight, left-handed, or Inuit. But I take him at his word, with more than ample supporting evidence, that he is a “liberal f*ck”. I won’t be gratuitously cruel, but should he ever resurface, I will treat him as he deserves.

“I speak with authority here, because I was openly gay before the ‘Stonewall rebellion,’ when it cost you something to be so. And I personally feel as a libertarian that people have the right to free thought and free speech,” [Camilla] Paglia, a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, said on Laura Ingraham’s radio show Thursday.

“In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as well as they have the right to support homosexuality — as I one hundred percent do. If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again they have a right of religious freedom there,” she added.

…

“To express yourself in a magazine in an interview — this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades,” Paglia said. “This is the whole legacy of free speech 1960’s that have been lost by my own party.”

Paglia went on to point out that while she is an atheist she respects religion and has been frustrated by the intolerance of gay activists.

“I think that this intolerance by gay activists toward the full spectrum of human beliefs is a sign of immaturity, juvenility,” Paglia said. “This is not the mark of a true intellectual life. This is why there is no cultural life now in the U.S. Why nothing is of interest coming from the major media in terms of cultural criticism. Why the graduates of the Ivy League with their A, A, A+ grades are complete cultural illiterates, etc. is because they are not being educated in any way to give respect to opposing view points.”

“There is a dialogue going on human civilization, for heaven sakes. It’s not just this monologue coming from fanatics who have displaced the religious beliefs of their parents into a political movement,” she added. “And that is what happened to feminism, and that is what happened to gay activism, a fanaticism.”

I don’t blame A&E—yet I do. They’re running a business, and they don’t need their spokesmen making trouble for them. Yet the network has done extremely well by the Dynasty dynasty. A little backbone, a little loyalty, is never a bad thing. They could have (and should have) condemned the remarks (if they found them condemnable), and dealt with the fallout like adults.

I don’t blame gay fanaticists—yet I do. Gay people have had it rough (stop laughing!), but their rights are lightyears beyond where they were even a decade ago. A man—a queer man (in the original sense of the word), quoting Corinthians, who also conceded that it was for God to judge the sinner—is allowed to hold and voice an anti-gay opinion without dragging homosexuals back into the closet. (An opinion expressed in a print interview, it must be noted, not on the show.) A&E’s premature capitulation is proof of who holds the power in the country. It ain’t the Bible-thumpers.

I don’t blame the Robertsons—yet I do. See above about freedom to hold and voice an opinion. But also see above about A&E being free to drop him. You make duck calls, you’re not a preacher. You’ve far exceeded your 15 minutes of fame, and you have a huge following. You are owed nothing more.

I guess the only people I blame unreservedly are the leftist cabal that called for duck scalp. I may share certain opinions, but you people disgust me.